Hey friends - coming to you with about an hour of cumulative sleep. Don’t let your baby get bug bites. She’s happier this morning. We ride on.

🌎 The Big Picture

Spoke to my team this week to sanity check whether we’re leaning pessimistic or negative. We’ve already built a process with automated tone checks and required contextualization to ensure we’re not leaning into any negative headlines that cherry-pick a one-month data point that’s not relevant to extrapolate meaning. We always try to give the historical context. We came to the conclusion that we’re still keeping it real. The challenge right now is just that a lot of numbers are actually historically bad. Plenty are historically normal. So I’m always trying to make sure we’re delivering the most balanced perspective.

Anyways, I digress… here’s what I think is worth knowing this week. Some of the stuff that sounded historically bad and also perfectly normal this week. When there’s something historically good, you know I've got you.

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Soaring housing costs have kept millions of working adults in their childhood bedrooms. 

Realtor.com counted a record 25.2 million adults under 35 still living with their parents last year, topping even pandemic-era numbers. Among adults aged 30 to 34, that share's nearly doubled since 2000, hitting 12.7%. The Federal Reserve found almost half of adults under 30 were living with a parent in 2025, up sharply from 37% in 2019.

Having a job doesn't fix it. About 70% of young adults living at home were employed, per Realtor.com.

The problem is affordability. Median rent prices have climbed 17% since 2019, and median home prices have increased twice as fast. Mortgage costs doubled over five years. This is reshaping household budgets and pushing back milestones like family development, homeownership, and independent retirement savings.

Home prices just hit a record in June, but buyers still caught a small break. 

Falling mortgage rates pushed the typical monthly payment down 2.5% from a year ago, per Zillow. That's a little breathing room, even with the median home selling at a record $440,600 according to the National Association of Realtors.

Prices are high, but they're not climbing as fast. 

Wages have been outpacing home price growth lately, which has helped affordability improve overall despite the record price tag. That's a rare win for buyers who've felt completely priced out for years.

💼

Companies putting the most money into AI are also hiring the fastest. 

A study from Ramp and Revelio Labs tracked spending and employment at more than 21,000 companies and found a clear positive link between AI spending and headcount growth. It's hard to know if AI investment drives hiring or if fast-growing companies just happen to spend more on AI, but either way, their headcount grew about 10% in the two years after ramping up AI investment. The biggest AI spenders were already larger, faster-growing, and more likely to have outside investors before they even adopted it.

AI spending isn't squeezing out younger workers, either. 

Entry-level employees made up a slightly larger share of heavy-AI companies' workforces, up about one percentage point compared to companies that hadn't adopted AI yet. Companies spending little on AI saw no hiring bump at all, and their entry-level share slipped instead. Researchers are careful to note this doesn't prove AI caused the hiring, since big spenders were probably going to grow anyway. But if you're job hunting, a company's AI investment might signal it's growing and bringing people on, even at the entry level.

Layoffs stayed broadly low last week, which is good news for workers' peace of mind.

The Labor Department reported initial unemployment claims dropped to 215,000, a small dip from the week before and right in line with where filings have been sitting all year. The four-week average has been trending lower, now well below last summer's levels. Continuing claims ticked up slightly but stayed below year-ago levels. Put it all together, and you've got a job market that's neither booming nor breaking down; employers are holding onto their people, just hiring slowly.

^🎓

Student loan borrowers, your repayment options just got an overhaul. 

The Department of Education replaced its old system with two streamlined plans starting July 1, 2026. You can pick the Tiered Standard Plan, which spreads payments over 10 to 25 years based on loan size, or the Repayment Assistance Plan, which ties your monthly payment to your income. Under the income-based plan, payments run between 1 and 10% of your income and can drop as low as $10 a month, with extra reductions if you've got dependents. Pay on time, and you get an interest waiver. If your payment falls short, the government kicks in up to $50 a month toward your principal. That means balances won't keep snowballing the way they did under old income-driven plans, where three out of four borrowers still owed more after six years, according to federal loan data cited by the department.

The catch? Forgiveness takes longer. Under the new income-driven plan, you won't qualify for forgiveness until you've made payments for thirty years, longer than the 20-to-25-year timelines on the plans it's replacing. Parents and students will want to dig into these new options as they plan for tuition costs ahead.

🏭 The Companies Everyone’s Talking About

❔ The Big Question of the Week

Scoops app users: We have taken the beta app offline for a short period for some major updates. Can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on! Reach out if you have any questions.

We’re going to switch up the content in this spotlight for a bit to make sure you all have the info you need to master your week.